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Podcast Sponsor/Advertiser
This episode is sponsored by the Planet Visionaries Podcast Planet Visionaries is back with a new season hosted by Alex Honnold, who you might know from his incredible solo climb of the 3,000 foot El Capitan in Yosemite national park this season. You can hear him in conversation with people who are not just imagining a better future, but actually building it. Here at Intelligence Squared, we love conversations that explore real solutions and real progress. In this podcast, you'll hear from scientists, explorers, activists and storytellers from around the world who are reshaping the future in practical and inspiring ways. In an upcoming episode, Alex speaks to Chris Tompkins, a conservationist and former CEO of Patagonia who has dedicated her life to preserving millions of acres of land across South America. In 2017, this vision led to one of the largest private land donations ever when her foundation gifted an area that the size of Denmark to Chile to create a new national park. What makes this show so compelling is that it highlights the human side of climate work. It's not just policy or numbers, it's people taking meaningful action to create a better world. Listen in to be part of the movement to reimagine our planet's future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, watch Spotify, YouTube or wherever you're listening right now. This episode is sponsored by indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of hiring is just working out where to start. Indeed makes it clear, simple and quick to reach the right talent. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed in the minute I've been talking to you. 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners to this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com intelligencesquared just go to indeed.com intelligencesquared right now and support Our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com intelligencesquared terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
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Producer Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer mia Sorrenti. At 300 years old, Antonio Vivaldi's the Four Seasons is a beloved masterpiece. So how can this piece of music still teach us about how we live, feel and experience the passing of the seasons today? On today's episode, broadcaster and musicologist Hannah French joins us to explore the enduring magic of Antonio Vivaldi's the Four Seasons. In conversation with Dr. Leah Broad, she reflects on how this iconic work continues to reveal new meanings through its rich imagery, poetry and connection to nature, health, food and the rhythms of the natural world, inviting us to rediscover the art of listening seasonally. Let's join our host, Dr. Leah Broad, now with more.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Hello, and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Dr. Leah Broad and our guest today is Dr. Hannah French. Once an academic and Baroque flautist, Dr. Dr. Hannah French now presents BBC Radio 3's Early Music show, the Saturday Breakfast show, and live concerts, including the BBC Proms. Her first book was Sir Henry wood, champion of J.S.
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Dr. Hannah French
Bach.
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Dr. Leah Broad
And her latest book is the Rolling Listening to the Seasons with Vivaldi. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Hannah.
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Dr. Hannah French
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Well, thanks for being here. It's a brilliant book. So, firstly, why the Four Seasons? What is it about this piece of music that made you think I need to write a book about it?
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Dr. Hannah French
Can I be really honest?
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Dr. Leah Broad
Yes, please do.
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Dr. Hannah French
Can I be really honest? I didn't mean to write a book about Vivaldi.
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Dr. Leah Broad
What did you mean to write a book about?
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Dr. Hannah French
I was going to write a book about seasonality and about this idea of seasonal listening, and I have done. It still is, but it came from radio and from presenting the breakfast show in music that's so specific to a day and a time that you just want to hear at that moment. And I thought, I think there's something in this. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized that Vivaldi's Four Seasons was the perfect gateway. Because, yeah, everyone knows the Four Seasons, right? And I thought, this is a real invitation.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Tell us about seasonal listening. What is seasonal listening?
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Dr. Hannah French
Well, it's anything you want it to be, from the really blinking obvious to quite nuanced stuff. So whether it's that you listen to the Christmas oratorio on the days of which those six cantatas that make up that work were first performed, and then you have an experience of a work that's not just in one evening or curtailed to fit into one evening, but that spreads and sits down and gives you an impression of that experience over about three weeks. So whether it's that or whether it's music that was written for a particular occasion in a particular season, that just makes sense to hear it. If you think, I suppose, about the times that we do listen seasonally, Christmas carols are the obvious one. But maybe it's music that you really love to hear at the proms, or it's a festival that you go to and you heard a particular opera there, and you always go by and say, oh, it's September. It makes me feel of Don Giovanni or whatever it might be. Sometimes it's things that have become interesting, ingrained in our own experience. But it's really fascinating to pinpoint when composers wrote things and if there's anything in the air at the time. And that's why Vivaldi's Four Seasons was such a gift. But I thought, well, I tell you what, I'll start each chapter with that and then that'll let us in. But the thing was that I asked the basic questions of the Four Seasons. When was it written? Who was it written for? Why was it written? And I couldn't answer any of those questions, so I set out to answer them, and before I knew it, that was the book.
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Dr. Leah Broad
So when Vivaldi writes the Four Seasons, where is he in his career? Where's he living? What's the background to these pieces?
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Dr. Hannah French
Vivaldi wasn't a spring chicken when he wrote the Four Seasons. He had spent many, many years in Venice to this point. He was actually 41 by the time he wrote them. So he had all sorts of experience performing, composing, teaching at the Pieta, lots of things that informed the way that he would write, and also a lot of life experience to write the human emotion, the human experience into the music. So he had been based in Venice, and in 1718 he took up a post in Mantua as a director of secular music, which actually, when you think about it, is quite a surprise move in Venice. He had had all sorts of operatic aspirations, so his playing was almost without compare, certainly with no doubt of his virtuosic abilities. He really wanted to be an impresario, but he wasn't really going to get that far in Venice. So Mantua, in a way, was a sidestep in order to move up the career ladder. And in Mantua, he would have all of these experiences that he could then bring back and get the job that he really wanted to. So he took up this role. He would arrive as quite a perhaps eccentric looking cleric, about to take up a post of secular music and also eventually take on opera there, which was the key to then going back and getting that kind of gig in Venice. But he was in charge of 23 musicians, no small band, and really had quite a lot of artistic freedom. And that's why, certainly serenatas and operas. He wrote four operas between 1718, 1720 in Mantua, about 40 serenatas, loads of concertos. He really could let his imagination run wild.
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Dr. Leah Broad
And just for people who don't know who Vivaldi is, can we get a one sentence on what he was doing at the Pieta and what that is?
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Dr. Hannah French
Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678. He grew up to be known as the Red Priest. He initially trained to work in the church, but then he relinquished that in favor of his music career, which had started young because his father had been a barber and then got a gig as a violinist at St. Mark's Basilica. And they would play together. They were one of the sights on the grand tour. You know, come to Venice, have your portrait painted, visit these frescoes and make sure you hear this pair of incredible flame haired virtuoso violinists. So Vivaldi was well known as a violinist, but in 1703 he got a job at the Pieta. And the Pieta was an institution for unwanted children. It was a place where babies were left in a kind of drawer in a wall and children grew up and then stayed. And they were separated between boys and girls. But in short, the girls took two different directions. They would either take up embroidery and cooking and cleaning and the kind of domestic side of the institution, or they went into music. And music for them was an incredible gift. They would, it would actually inform their identities. They would take on a surname based on the instrument that they played or the voice part that they had. And Vivaldi came in to teach them. And clearly, whatever misgivings we may have about his managerial skills, his organisational skills, he comes across as quite a chaotic person with quite a difficult character at times. He clearly inspired them. And these women and women they were, because they stayed some until their 90s, they lived in the Pieta. So this wasn't an orchestra of children, it was an orchestra of women of all ages. But their abilities, I believe, were pretty phenomenal. And Vivaldi headed up for many decades this all female professional standard ensemble of players and singers at the Pieter.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Tell me about the research process for this book, because it feels like you travelled absolutely everywhere in discovering Vivaldi's Four Seasons.
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Dr. Hannah French
Well, I was really clear it emerged quite early on that the best way to do this was to write them in track, in step with the year. So I gave myself a year to write the initial manuscript and I lined up people to talk to at very specific moments. Talk to me about this. Yeah, yeah. But will you do it in May or will you do it in October? Because that's when I really need to meet you and actually just be very present, Feel what's going on in the weather and the feel and what we're wearing and how we interact at those times of the year. And then there were festivals and specific events in northern Italy that Vivaldi would have experienced. And I wanted to be there at those moments to taste the dishes that he would have tasted because they haven't changed in all this time, and go to a service and just see if I could just live those moments and see what came of it. So it was a bit of an experiment, but I knew that I wanted to articulate the music in a certain way and ask questions of it that I would only. You know, you can only really go bird watching and hear those birds at that time of year because that's when they're there. So it did dictate the agenda. And I'm really glad that that was the process. There was then editing after that, but it was a year of writing.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Wow, okay. And so where you're talking about birds, these come up throughout all. Well, throughout the book, if not necessarily the four seasons. So where are birds most present and why are they important?
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Dr. Hannah French
Well, they're really important. They're important when they're there and it's really telling when they disappear. So primarily in spring and summer. And in spring, he doesn't name them. So the four seasons, some people would be very, very familiar with them. Some people just learning now that they come with poetry, with sonnets, and that Vivaldi ascribed very specific effects in the music. With the sonnets, he aligned them really closely. And in spring, he just talks about the birds. The arrival, arrival of the birds. They're singing their hearts out. But when you look at the music, you look at the score, you can see that there are various levels, depths, if you like, of birds. It's like sitting in a bird hide and hearing, ah, there's the ones up there, there's some in the middle or there's some at ground level. And so I really wanted to Try and find out who the spring bird characters were because he doesn't name them there, they're here en masse and the important thing is that they arrive and that they sing and that there's a little storm, but then they sing again afterwards. Cause everything's really okay. So that's the main message. But I went birding with Tom McKinney, weekday breakfast presenter, who is mad for birds and has incredible knowledge and the most wonderful ears. Anyway, we went birding on a very, very, very wet late spring day. And I believe we identified what they are between larks and nightingales and birds to do with the call and the specific way that Vivaldi writes in the score and also the activity and the responses that they have. Yeah, it was, yeah, it's fascinating. But then come summer, Vivaldi names the birds. So you get the cuckoo, you get the goldfinch and you get this idea that the characters of the birds are really critical to the music. So the cuckoo being a prime example of the. The most hideous, murderous, horrible, horrible bird. This whole idea of the soft cooing cuckoo, it's just ridiculous. Well, it's not. That's what we hear, but not what Vivaldi hears and not what he writes. Because this kind of doom laden storm approaching awfulness of summer is completely encapsulated in the female cry of a cuckoo. And she has time to sing. Lots of female birds don't sing. She has time to sing because she completely outsources all of the childcare. So she lays her egg in another unassuming bird's nest and that bird takes on the egg, the egg hatches the fetus, if that's what we call an unborn bird, spins much faster in the egg than any other bird because it has to be strong because the first thing it does is murders all the other chicks or smashes the eggs, becomes the prime child and the bird takes it on until it fledges and goes. It is the most horrific process. It's really brutal. But the more I learned about this kind of thing, the more the music made sense and the more, you know, I don't suppose that Vivaldi was a really keen birder, but these were the birds that they heard. They didn't have to go to a nature reserve to experience them. These were the birds that were around town in Venice and Mantua in his day. And some of them they would have known about cuckoos, certainly.
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Dr. Leah Broad
And so how important is Vivaldi's Venice to these concertos? And also what was Vivaldi's Venice like?
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Dr. Hannah French
Well, Vivaldi's Venice is sort of important to them. But the image that we have of Vivaldi working as he did in the Pieta doesn't really line up with the Four Seasons. There's actually no evidence that he performed it there. And with the women of the Pieta, I think he probably did, but I don't think that it's central to. To the development of the concertos. I think they really come from Mantua. So there are various reasons for that. The main one, well, one of the main ones that people have cited before is that they're quite rural, so it's a lot about farming and the birds. And Venice is a busy, thriving port. And where Vivaldi lived, where he grew up, is right near the Grand Canal and the Pieta on the Grand Canal. And then a couple of stops up on a vaporetto, you get to the theatre that he worked at most often, sant'. Angelo. So the idea of him watching the grape harvest and seeing the storms whipping through the farmland really doesn't carry much with Venice. But in 1718, he took up a court position in Mantua, and it's the only time he really took a paid court position in his life. He was very much tied to the Pieta and then as an opera composer and later impresario. But this was a very specific time. And he arrived there probably looking very much like a slightly eccentric cleric, but going there to take up a very secular post with this incredible gift of 23 musicians in a band who could do all sorts of. And he wasn't in charge of opera when he arrived, but he soon was after that. And he took with him set designers and he was fascinated in all the elements of production. So the Four Seasons come from this kind of meeting of high art and nature and something that he would absolutely have seen in Mantua, whether he was out in the fields or not. And I don't believe he was, because I think he was actually quite a disabled man. That's something that definitely emerged out of my research. We can come back to that, that he, from the Ducal palace, had an incredible view out across the lakes that surround Mantuan, onto the land beyond it. And I think it's this. Yeah, as I say, this meeting of spectacle and literature, poetry and placing musicians, orchestral musicians, center stage in giving them roles that perhaps they might have had in an opera, and imagining those musicians on stage rather than in the pit. So I think that they emerge from this time and I think there are a couple of occasions in which they could have been played in Mantua, that really tie into explaining perhaps where, when or why he wrote them.
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Dr. Leah Broad
And so how common, or rather how unusual is the Four Seasons, both of its time and in Vivaldi's output? Because you mentioned that the seasons themselves were actually quite a common topic when Vivaldi's writing these concertos. So what is it, do you think about Vivaldi's Four Seasons that has stuck with us for so long?
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Dr. Hannah French
Well, I think you're right. You know, the Four Seasons are a really universal theme, and they're definitely there well before Vivaldi in music, let alone in art and architecture and fountains at Versailles or whatever that might be. So I think that striking on that as potential inspiration for something that became so much more than just a title is really crucial. And I think what he did that others hadn't before. I can't find any violin concertos before these that really deal so specifically, so comprehensively, so poetically with the Four Seasons. And giving it to a narrator, to a single person, to kind of lead his cast of characters and effects is a really striking thing. It's something that he would absolutely have done himself, but could perhaps, when returning to the Pieta in Venice, have brought back his postcards from Mantua and said, hey, four of you. You can take on the personalities of each of these. But I think what he does with the Four Seasons is taps into a very 18th century idea of music becoming much more psychological. So before Vivaldi, depictions of the Four Seasons were much more allegorical and they were poetic, but they would perhaps be of a scene or you'd get a moment in an opera that was all chilly for winter or, you know, that kind of thing. But what he does is he puts humanity right in there. So it's about fear and relief and then suffering and then some joy on the end. You know, it's about all of those experiences that you might have throughout the year. And I think that's where it's really embedded. And it's not just in the poetry and it's not just in the performance, but it's in the depth of the music, even from the keys that he uses, whether it's major keys when nature is benign in spring or in autumn, or minor keys where it's really malignantly offensive in summer and winter.
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Dr. Leah Broad
Yeah, summer is a concerto that always surprises me because it's so angry. And fear is not really an emotion that I strongly associate with summer. And you talk about later in your book with sort of more Beautiful poetry about the nice sort of summer landscapes. That's not Vivaldi's summer at all. So can you tell us a bit about Vivaldi's summer and why it's so terrifying?
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Dr. Hannah French
Yeah. Vivaldi's summer is heading in a straight line for one of the worst possible storms that could hit northern Italy in that period. All the other concertos change key for the middle movement, at least, and this one doesn't. So there's just no deviation, there's no sheltering, there's no escape from what is inevitably going to happen. And although it's the plight of a shepherd or a farmer, an arable worker at this time, if your crops failed, your family didn't eat, you couldn't plant the crops for the next year either, your town would suffer. The landowner who you paid your taxes to wouldn't get his revenue. He wouldn't be able to put it into other things as well. You can end up with social unrest. It's all sorts of implications from starvation if your crops don't come good. And so that's a very real element of it. The fear that is wound into the first movement, you see through the birds, through his choice of birds and their characters. As we've come to the second movement, I find particularly fascinating and really telling for Vivaldi as a man and his experience of summer. I think it's something akin to an asthma attack. Now, we don't know exactly what was wrong with Vivaldi, but we do know that by the end of his life, he wasn't able to leave the house unless he got in a gondola or a carriage. He couldn't walk. He suffered with a tight chest and clearly found it hard to breathe at times. And so when you have that on the one hand, and on the other, this dazzling virtuoso who played incredible concertos in the intervals of his operas and traveled around all over the place. How do you marry up those two things? And so there's various research that's going on at the moment. Giuseppe Gulo is a Vivaldi scholar who's doing incredible research into Eisenmenger syndrome, which actually is a pulmonary disorder which Vivaldi may well have had. And then the classic thing is that he had asthma. And I'm not convinced in any direction, really, the asthmatic thing. Well, he certainly had a tight chest. And asthma presents in lots of different ways. And this middle movement of summer rumbles with thunder. And between those thunderous rumbles, you get this long, high, tight melody line that runs for any length of time before a sudden rumble of thunder and a horrible silence. And then it takes up again. And the more you live with that, the more you think, wow, this is somebody who is potentially struggling to breathe, who has to keep going, who's been taken by surprise by the weather, who's really suffering in the humidity. I mean, Mantua was awful in the summer. These swamps and the lakes around it. Monteverdi had suffered before and his dad was an apothecary and a surgeon. And it was one of the factors that moved Monteverdi from Mantua to Venice. And I wonder whether Vivaldi really suffered in Venice with that humidity. There's also something in thunder and lightning in that when lightning strikes, it splits the grain and these tiny little particles get into the air. And anybody who doesn't even have asthma can start to feel that restriction and that effect of it. And it can be called anniversary asthma. Something that comes back every summer, I suppose, aligned with hay fever, but certainly within a real discomfort of that time of the year. And so I wanted to explore that, and I did with Andrew Bush, who's a pediatric respirologist in Imperial College. And he was really helpful. We tried to give Vivaldi a historical consultation, see how that would go. But it does make you think about him and that experience of summer. And then the last movement is the inevitable. The winds arrive and they are unrelenting until there is a final cry from the shepherd that this really is all that can be done and his crops are spoiled. There's no happy ending. This is not ice creams in the afternoon and an ice apple in a cobbled courtyard in a North Italian town. It's really hideous. Really hideous.
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Dr. Leah Broad
No. And I love the way you wrote about it. Cause I definitely heard the concertos differently after reading your description of them and your analysis. And at the time where I was reading about the cuckoo in summer, one of my daughters has these like press book things and she just sits there going, cuckoo, cuckoo. The whole time. I was like, oh, this is a bit sinister really, isn't it? So I quite enjoyed that little moment. But so this is your whole exploration is really rooted in the body, in kind of physicality and in sensation. So what do you feel that we learn about this music and about Vivaldi by taking this approach?
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Dr. Hannah French
I think that the notion of going back to where somebody wrote something is very romantic and it's a bit rosy tinted spectacles and it's all very lovely. But, you know, that was a long time ago and I Think part of what I wanted to learn by going back, you know, there are buildings that acoustics don't change in, and there are views that, you know, if you squint a little bit and take out some pylons at a roundabout or something, that is what they saw. But I suppose the most telling thing was in Mantua, because the Four Seasons are ubiquitous, but there isn't anywhere in Venice that you can go and sit and go, ah, yes, look, fountains or archways or buildings or. There's no obvious Four Seasons there. And I thought, it's got to be somewhere. And I went to the Ducal palace in Mantua, and Stefano Locasso is the director then, and he really got into this. We went on a bit of a romp around the palace looking for places that he could have performed the Four Seasons, the likely candidates, the likely spaces. And he eventually got called away and he said, look, there's one last place I think you should go to. And it's about the furthest you can get in the palace. And yeah, and there were so many little. I use a wheelchair, so so many little stairlifts and tight doorways and ramps and. Yeah. Anyway, we got there and it's in the apartment of Troy, and there is a wonderful walkway that you can roll down to get there. And then the apartment of Troy has these incredible Romano frescoes. They're beautiful. And at Vivaldi's time, that area of the palace wasn't lived in. Prince Philip of Hesse Darmstadt had been installed there. And they were almost like. It was like a hermit crab palace. He just chose which bits they were going to do up. And part of having Vivaldi there was to restore the former Gonzaga glory and make Mantua brilliant. And so that part of the palace would have been used for entertaining and people would want to go and see those frescoes. So we headed down there, went in there. Great. On the side of it, there is a. Well, a concert hall. It's called the hall of Months. And all around it there are stuccos of the months of the year and depictions of passing time day to night, all that kind of stuff. I'm like, wow, this is something. And they said, yeah, yeah, they used to perform chamber music in here. And I'm like, wow, really cool acoustic for this. And I'll go through this. And I think, okay, so out of these windows you can see arable land. And here we've got this kind of height of art and great taste in time and the passing of time through the year and the months. And then at the end of that long, thin concert hall area, it had been a balcony, but they'd bricked it up in the 16th century and made it into this kind of space. At the end of it, there's a loggia, a kind of portico that looks out onto the lake. It's called Eleonora's Loggia, and people take selfies on it with the lake behind them, and it's all terribly lovely, and then they hurry inside to see the impressive frescoes. But when you get onto that loggia with the concert hall of the months behind you, and you turn around, the walls are really worn by the weather because it's straight onto the elements. But if you look up in the cornices of the roof, there are four frescoes of the four seasons. And it was one of those moments where you go, okay, okay. Now, for whatever reason and for whoever he wrote these, I believe he wrote them in Mantua. And you're suddenly at this point where high art meets nature, with four frescoes of the four seasons and a place where you could play them, and it just feels like things fall into place. And that, for me, was the real lesson in going back to where you really think something was written and just, well, literally opening your eyes and looking up, but also being open to the idea that that could be an answer.
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Dr. Leah Broad
And what does it feel like to get to that point where it feels almost like breakthrough or discovery?
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Dr. Hannah French
I mean, I genuinely was getting hot, and my heart was racing. I'm like, hang on a minute. Could this be it? Because it does line up. It also lines up to be written in 1719, because Prince Philip was going to marry Eleonora de Guastale, who had been born princess of the Gonzagas in Manchua, and she'd been married off to a Medici, packed off to Florence. Not a very happy marriage. He was an awful lot older than her. She clearly just did her best to avoid him until she was widowed. And then she was having a very jolly time in Florence, really, heading up lots of literary, well, academias, in a way. And she had this fabulous circle of poets and. And writers. And she was a good match. I mean, frankly, the kind of political machinations of tying families together. She was a bit of a pawn in that. But had she married Philip, it would have really secured the Gonzaga line back in Mantua again. And it was all intended for 1719. And then it didn't happen. And we don't really know why it didn't happen, but it got a long way. Like, the date was set and it was all ready to happen. And some think that Vienna got nervous that she would make claim to Mantua. And she was a headstrong woman. And other people say that she had illegitimate children in Florence. And they. A little bit like Strozzi. I see her in that kind of figure, Barbara Strozzi. That she had her own mind, possibly had her own children, but they were going to tarnish her reputation so that she wouldn't be suitable to marry Prince Philip. Either way, it didn't happen. But if it had happened, the Four Seasons would have been a really interesting thing. In that, you know, Vivaldi is starting to think much more poetically and literally about it. Prince Philip really loved spectacle. So it would have married spectacle with the kind of literary side of things in music, potentially, then played in a concert hall dedicated to the months with frescoes of the four seasons, the meeting of nature and high art. And it's just those kinds of things that come together because we do know. About the only thing we really know for certain is that the Four Seasons were published in 1725, which is a long time after this event. But in the dedication to it, she dedicates to Count Morzine, who was a member of the aristocracy in Prague, who had definitely visited Mantua quite likely in that year. Whether he was going to be at the wedding or not is a total different matter. And we certainly don't have guest lists. But the idea that he had heard prototype versions of the Four Seasons is very real because in the dedication, Vivaldi writes with some embarrassment that there'd been such a delay before these had actually been published. And actually, Mahzine had probably given him, like, a grant to help have them published. So he was embarrassed on both fronts that he'd seen them earlier, probably been paid for them, and that he said, they'll be quite transformed from when you last heard them. So it does make me think, right, okay, so perhaps in the first place, they were inspired by these frescoes, by this setting, by this idea of writing for a wedding. Because one of the precedents for the Four Seasons is an opera called Pomona, in which the four seasons are in competition as to which one is the best. And eventually Jupiter has to decide, and he rules in favor of autumn. And Pomona, because she was the goddess of marriage. Well, she was the goddess of fruit trees, but she symbolized marriage because Vertumnus was her partner. And there was also. So what I'm trying to say is it's bound up in this idea of. Of the four seasons at weddings. So by the time you Start putting all these things together. There's nothing for certain, but I feel all the ingredients are there in Mantua.
- [36:34]
Dr. Leah Broad
Okay, so we come round to autumn, and the harvest plays a really large role in autumn. So how does that come through in the music?
- [36:43]
Dr. Hannah French
Well, initially, a lot of drunkenness. And I was in Mantua on market day, and there was quite a lot of drunkenness there all around the square, the same square where market would have been in Vivaldi's time. And, yeah, the big question really, I suppose is, is Vivaldi drunk? Is he the drunk soloist? I mean, you really have to ham it up to make it work. Is it him? Is he making fun of a courtier? Has he seen people around the marketplace with all the produce, trying the first of the new wines and feeling the effects of that? Could he not take drink himself? So I was really fascinated in the ways that Vivaldi had interacted with wine. And I have a great friend who lives in New York who is a wine historian, and we tried to work out what would have been in Vivaldi's wine cellar in Venice and also in Mantua, because as a cleric, he would have had access to. To some really fine wines. And certainly visiting dignitaries would have plied him with their fine wines as well. So, yeah, there's that side of it, and then, you know, the effects of that in the Seca movement, where everyone's intoxicated and dreaming all sorts of dreams. Yeah, I think that the harvest is a really integral part of that time of year, whether you're out in the fields or you're watching it being brought into the markets. And actually, the ducal palace in Mantua is a huge. It's a vast complex, and it's got gardens within it. So there are vines hanging around it. I mean, it's in the corridors, in the ark, but it's also in these little gardens. So he could have experienced quite a lot of that harvest look and feel and smell without even leaving the palace walls.
- [38:38]
Dr. Leah Broad
And so musically, how is autumn different from. From summer? And how's he creating that sense, as you say, of, quite frankly, inebriation?
- [38:48]
Dr. Hannah French
Well, the first movement, yes. He challenges the soloists to go to great lengths. And actually, when you talk to. I'm not a violinist, but when you talk to violinists as soloists, they say when you get to that point, it is really difficult to pull off in a concert because summer is exhausting. You know, this is a big play, especially if you just do it back to back. And so, yeah, you do have to completely act Drunk. But your cast of characters have to decide who's holding it together at any given point. And actually, Autumn is different to the others in a way in that the tunes are quite simple, they're quite straightforward, they're real toe tapping moments. There's nothing really to trip you up. And especially in that first moment, you need something like that. You have to have a chorus of people who are all like cheersing their glasses together to keep it together. Because the soloist, when he's slipping and sliding around and going, oh, look what I could play, oh, I've fallen over again, needs something to do that against, otherwise the whole thing would fall apart. So that really plays into the idea of the violin concerto and the idea that you'd have a ripieno group of a band who would come back and rally everything so it holds it together. And then by the time you get to the last movement, the Hunt, I mean, that is a really different feel, I think, to everything else. In the Four Seasons. It's the only moment where we come across death. You know, the quarry, the stag perhaps has that real touching moment where its spirit lifts and the hunt pauses for a while before moving off again. It's done very poignantly. I find it a really difficult movement. I find it probably the cheesiest and the hardest to take seriously, even though it's perhaps the most poignant. And I really grappled with that and I talked to various musicians, those interviews are captured in the book to try and work out why that's hard, to really feel as emotively as you want to feel it. And that's bound up in tempos and articulation and ornaments and suspense and drama and even a little bit of pantomime here and there. It's got to be the right balance of those things because, you know, the Four Seasons, they do suffer from being played a lot. And not every performance is going to move you. And so that was another big part of the book. I wanted to talk to people who'd performed it in a whole range of different ways and consider the early recordings and the development of different interpretations to see how and why we respond to the music in the way that we do it at different times. I mean, different eras, if you like. And I think that at the moment, you know, recent recordings, especially of this last movement of Autumn, I find much more persuasive. I think, you know, often in baroque music say, oh, it just gets played faster and faster. And, you know, that doesn't necessarily make it more exciting. And I entirely agree with that, but I do think that Vivaldi probably didn't ride a horse, so his idea of how quickly a horse moves and you can't really match that quite with the music to make it do that thing, you've got to find where its sweet spot lies.
- [42:05]
Dr. Leah Broad
Yes, it makes for a very relaxed hunt sometimes, doesn't it?
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Dr. Leah Broad
So and Then finally we come to winter and we're back in one of the more tempestuous seasons. So what did you find out about winter and the sort of environment around Vivaldi that inspired this concerto?
- [44:55]
Dr. Hannah French
Winter is interesting because I think it's the one concerto where you can really feel the influence of Venice rather than Mantua. Only a couple of years. If we decide if you come with me on the four seasons being written in 1719, only a few years before, the entire Venetian lagoon had frozen. So we're not talking about the canals. They would freeze most years in Vivaldi's lifetime. I mean, the entire lagoon, completely frozen. It happened in 1709, it happened again in 1716. And for Vivaldi and his family, this, along with all the other residents of Venice, would have been terrifying. I mean, tens of thousands of people perished because they couldn't get food, they couldn't get fuel to light fires. They were completely cut off from the mainland. And it was a long time before they realized that horses and carriages or carts could actually be held by the ice and they could get supplies across. So the idea that winter starts with this entirely frozen landscape isn't. Yes, it's skating season. Woo woo. It's, oh, my goodness, we're completely cut off. There's nothing that we can do about this. You're trapped in ice. And for someone like Vivaldi, who potentially wasn't very mobile, who suffered with a tight chest, yes, that could be horrific in summer. But also, I mean, we all know that when the weather suddenly turns and you go out on the school run at 8 o' clock in the morning, you cough because it's cold suddenly in your lungs. You know, imagine what that is like in unheated houses. And you don't know how long it's going to be and it can be months. And so these great winters, as they were called that, that happened more frequently than we'd like to think about right now, in what we now know as the Little Ice Age, were a terrifying time. So winter to begin with is stark and there are no birds, there's no wildlife. It is just an entirely frozen world, and one in which people are testing the ice, seeing how far they can go, falling. It's not fun and games. The fun and games are there, but they are right at the end of the concerto, just as carnival comes towards the end of winter and brings that joy that is so badly needed at that time of year.
- [47:36]
Dr. Leah Broad
And so would you say that the relationship between humans and nature is, I don't know, harmonious maybe in the Four Season.
- [47:45]
Dr. Hannah French
I wouldn't say harmonious, but I would say dynamic and very real. You know, the idea that the four seasons are not just pastoral allegories or romanticized views of each season becomes very, very real for Vivaldi. You know, he had a neighbor in Venice who was an artist called Rosalba Carriera. And this is the cool thing about this book. I mean, you write a book about a dead white man and you think, oh, does the world need. Does the world need another recording of Vivaldi's Four Season? Does the world need a book about Vivaldi's Four seasons? But actually, he led me to some really interesting women, and Rosalba Carriera was one of them. She was an artist in Venice, and she really, amongst other things, got into pastels and pastel portraits, which was really savvy, because if you were on the grand tour and you wanted your portrait doing in oil, then great Venice was a really good place to do it. But it would take a really long time. A pastel could be completed best part of a week. So she got into this and it went very well for her. But the thing with these pastels is that they are quite whimsical. They're very, very real. And the faces that you see, some of them are very beautiful, but they also have faces that could look like somebody. You know, somehow she sees past the stylized fashions of the day to the actual people. And she did incredible self portraits through each of the four seasons. And the one in winter is of her as an old person. And that, I think, was quite inspirational for me in terms of seeing Vivaldi in this book through the four seasons of his own life. And when I came across Rosalba showing herself through her seasons and come winter, yes, an old woman. You can see the macular degeneration in her eyes. She's got a kind of funny dimple in her chin and she's got her lips. But also she has a real twinkle and she's wearing furs and she's got pearls, and she's a confident woman. But she does also look a little bit like, I don't know, your Auntie Joan, who's not a real auntie, who lives three doors down. You know, it's that kind of realism. And I think that is exactly what you see with Vivaldi and the Four Seasons. There's a reality to it that's not airbrushing the harshness. It's showing this dynamic way in which people exist in nature and how sometimes it is a celebration, and other times it's just awful and you've just got to get through it. But then when you put autumn, the tricky one for me, into that, you actually get quite a lot of relief in autumn and that kind of resolution. And actually, then when they do have a successful harvest and things are gonna be okay, you're like, oh, yeah, that is why that's wound into the music and why on its own, I'm like, is there really much depth to this? But there is when you put it back into context.
- [50:50]
Dr. Leah Broad
So why do you think this music and that relationship is still important now?
- [50:58]
Dr. Hannah French
I think that the fascination with articulating our place in nature is actually the key to understanding so many pieces of music. And I think that what Vivaldi does here is he makes it so explicit that he gives us the kind of the tools, the keys to recognize it and ourselves in other pieces of music. So in that respect, it comes back to where I started. It is a gateway. It's a gateway into his seasonality, but into other notions of listening seasonally, too. It grounds us. It roots us. It's like. It's like slowing down to appreciate what we have. And as the world is changing, and that sounds like such a massive platitude. But as the seasons change, as the environment changes, Vivaldi's Four Seasons could become even more nostalgic, in a way, for how things were. But at the same time, they're not nostalgic just for the peaceful bits. They are a reminder of how powerful nature is and how we have to respect it and learn to live with it and alongside it. There's no shying away from that reality. And I think that's perhaps, you know, if they weren't like that, they could be a bit twee, but they're not tweeting. They've got great depth and human understanding.
- [52:20]
Dr. Leah Broad
Yeah. And, you know, this is one of these pieces that has been reworked so many times over and over again. And do you think that, obviously, relationship to nature has changed a huge deal since Vivaldi's time? So do you feel like, are there reimaginings that you feel capture that sense of change or that respond in a particularly interesting way to the originals?
- [52:43]
Dr. Hannah French
Yes. Well, I think that although the way that nature challenged Vivaldi's audiences versus our audiences today is vastly different, but the fear of not being able to feed your family, the fear of crops changing and having to be changed like that. Fear. Fear is still deeply rooted in our society. It's just that it has developed with technology and with ideas and with time. You know, I suppose that the. The dangers of winter in Vivaldi's Venice, you know, the lagoon is very, very unlikely to ever freeze over again. The canals may well, of course, and. And that wouldn't be surprising, but for the entire 50, 50 square kilometers of deep, brackish water to freeze again just seems very, very unlikely. But the fear that Venetians have now are of rising tides, of acqua alta, you know, of erosion, of Venice slipping into the lagoon. And I think that those are timeless emotions that when people then take Vivaldi's Four Seasons as inspiration, that's what they can tap into. So when Ayanna Witter Johnson takes winter as her inspiration for Black Star March and capturing the thoughts and the imaginations and the experiences of her Caribbean heritage, then she's drawing on different scenes, she paints different pictures. But that emotion of joy and relief, but also of fear and all those kinds of things are still absolutely embedded in the music.
- [54:41]
Dr. Leah Broad
And do you feel like you have a personal or especially personal connection to Vivaldi and to this piece?
- [54:47]
Dr. Hannah French
Well, I do now. I don't think I did before. I think I always thought. I think I was always just jealous that I never got to play it. I think that was the thing as a flautist, like, oh, I bet this is really fun.
- [55:00]
Dr. Leah Broad
Yeah.
- [55:01]
Dr. Hannah French
And of course you could play arrangements and all that kind of stuff, but I didn't. And I suppose I've always had it slightly at arm's length. And now my family and I have had it very, very close to home for quite a long time. So I do feel a lot more connected with it. And at the end of the process, had to put it all back together again. And I got very used to listening endlessly to whichever season in whichever season. And then when it came to putting it back and thinking, well, I'm gonna have to hear this all on one night. Do I really want to hear it all on one night? And then it brought in those analogies with things like the pizza and thinking, do I really want the whole year on a plate? Because now I've experienced it in its own season and just taken time to breathe the air and to understand how it works. Do I really want to have that kind of whiplash of 2 and a half min of each movement in one evening? And that's when I went to talk to Angela Clutton, the great food writer who is fascinated by seasonality. She writes brilliantly about seasonality. And I said to her, well, how Do I reconcile this now? And she said, well, see it this way, that the Four Seasons is on a plate entirely unseasonal, but you can bottle or pickle or preserve all of the elements of it. I mean, it was the Neapolitans who came up with the idea of a Four Seasons Pizza. And at the Port of Naples, they put loads of seafood on it in whichever season on the rest of it. But now it is quite stylized. So you get the artichokes in spring, and then in summer, it's the mozzarella and the tomatoes ripened under the sun, and in autumn, the earthiness of the mushrooms, and in winter, the. The things from the larder. So the preserved meat. So I suppose if you were to have a pizza now, and I think if I was to have one in whichever season I'd want it in, I'd want that bit to be seasonal, and then accept that the rest of it's been preserved for the rest of the year. I mean, that's a pretty niche request in my local Italian. But I suppose that's how I've come to hear them now. And at whatever time of the year you hear them, I now have images in my mind of the season that's fresh at any given point. And then the others are bottled, their memories and things that I can then suddenly feel very viscerally. You know, I'm not gonna forget being absolutely drenched in Manchua. I mean, really drenched, I'd say three times one day, and we were talking all the way through. I had every item of clothing that I'd taken with me on that trip was drying on a radiator in my hotel room. That doesn't go away when you think about the rain in winter, that soaks you to the skin. You know, it really is that. And the cobbles. Oh, my goodness, the cobbles in Mantua. Trying to get a wheelchair across those cobbles when they're soaking wet and your hands are slipping and you're like, okay, this is grim. This is grim.
- [58:07]
Dr. Leah Broad
Okay, all right. So before we leave, are there any other pieces that you think particularly benefit from seasonal listening?
- [58:15]
Dr. Hannah French
Well, this is the last hurrah in the book, so I recommend music that I've listened to throughout this year as well, because I. I mean, hand on heart, I haven't just listened to the Four seasons in these four quarters of the year. I know. Can you believe it? There were other things, too. And actually, you know, whether it's going to Versailles in spring for the. The very first celebrations that. That King Louis XIV had when he moved his court there. And Lully's music that was on the theme of the Four Seasons in May 1664, like, this is fantastic music to listen to in spring that just captures that optimism, that grandeur, all of those ideas of awakening that we hear in the four seasons come summer. Let's pick something like the water music, Handel's Water Music. A Summer spectacular on the River Thames. Probably the best musical cruise that's ever, ever been in history. You know, things like that that were so flexible that you could have while you were eating or while you were traveling or as he got off the boat. And a small moment by some beautiful rose bushes over here. They're a very evocative of a hot summer's evening. Autumn. So much great music for autumn and so many great connotations with the earth. And the key of G minor, which actually isn't the key that Vivaldi writes in for that season, but was another key that was associated with that. But, you know, when I am laid in, Earth is written in G minor harpsichord concertos by Wilhelmina of Prussia, who sadly died in autumn and has a monument to friendship built for her in autumn by Frederick the Great. There are just stories to be told. And I think that's part of the key to seasonal listening, is telling these stories at the same time as hearing the music. Because that's basically what I've ended up doing with this. And, yes, the music is about the season, but when you know why, then you hear it differently. So I think that's the case with this tea come winter. Well, Christmas. And I have a real bone to pick with Christmas. No, I have a real bone to pick with Christmas.
- [60:39]
Dr. Leah Broad
How could you?
- [60:40]
Dr. Hannah French
Well, the thing is, I absolutely love Advent, but Advent is not Christmas. And commercially and culturally, our Christmas is Advent. And then I knew people who take down the Christmas tree on Boxing Day. That's the second day of Christmas. So, you know, for my money, I would have Advent music all the way up to Christmas Eve. Then I would light the lights and put all of the really Christmassy stuff on the tree. And then you get the 12 days of Christmas, you get epiphany. And then, yeah, lose all of the really Christmassy. I mean, I'm not saying sing, oh, come all you faithful all the way to February, but Candlemas, the 2nd of February, if you leave up your tree, take off all of the really Christmasy, but just leave the little lights on, then that glow in the corner of your house keeps you going through January, famous for being you know, 372 days long and then it doesn't feel that long. And you can keep music, Christmas music going, maybe lose the words, but there are Christmas concertos, all that kind of stuff that can fill certainly early January. So, yes, these are the things that I would really recommend that we just build into our, our year. And it's whether you have this on while you're cooking or while you're driving or whether you actually take 10, 15 minutes a day to just have an appointment with a piece of music. And the benefits that I found of doing that are just manifold. You know, unintentionally, you breathe deeper, you just have a reset moment. It is a mindful moment in the best way. And I'm not advocating anything in particular to do except set aside 15 minutes and listen to a piece of music because the number of times that we might say, oh, I had to pull the car over just to hear the end of that, or I had to just stop folding the washing and listen to what was on the radio at that particular moment, if we can create more of those moments in our day, then the chances are we did have a little reset. And it did make us think differently about our day and how we went about things as a result of it. And so I would heartily recommend that to you.
- [62:55]
Dr. Leah Broad
That could be your Advent recommendations.
- [62:58]
Dr. Hannah French
15 minutes, 100%. I've written a baroque Advent calendar, so perhaps I need to put that somewhere and then everyone could just spend that 15 minutes going, it's okay. It's actually not yet Christmas. I don't have to be frantic. These are the dark days of anticipation. And the anticipation is so incredible.
- [63:17]
Dr. Leah Broad
Well, there we end. And I think that's a perfect place to end. So, Hannah, thank you so much. That was Dr. Hannah French, author of the Rolling Year, listening to the seasons with Vivaldi, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I've been. Dr. Leah Broad. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you for joining us.
- [63:37]
Producer Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Mark Margarita Volpatto and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. Why not become a member@intelligentsquared.com membership and to join us at future live events, head to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full event program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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